I like Chelsea. I’ve been going there every day since Christmas, to the English Gardening School at the Chelsea Physic Garden. A diploma in garden design (it’s finished now…have I mentioned that I got the prizes for top student and for garden writing? Well. I did). It was cold when we started. January. You’d think there’d be not much in bloom but the garden was filled with scent. Sarcococca confusa and S. hookeriana, Viburnum x bodnantense, Daphne bholua quietly infusing still air.

There’s so much to write about but what struck me was that every day I’d pass the local school on my way back to the Tube and, without fail, every day some huge unnecessary beast of a car left badly parked on double yellow lines by an impossibly thin woman with a bad temper would block my way or try to end my life. (I make sweeping generalisations about people, I know I do, but it’s based on observation….and a bit of imagination.) And on most days school children in long caterpillars would press their noses up against the glass of the Cactus House at the Physic Garden, wide eyed and full of questions.

I was in Manchester Art Gallery a while ago, in the small cafe at the back and a woman came in pushing a wheelchair in which was a man about her age. He had no coordination, no control and she fed him juice or water from a blue child’s cup with a lid. He was her husband. She asked me just to keep an eye on him while she went to the loo. She looked grey, exhausted, tearful and I wondered if she’d come back.

Love

She parked him near the window

rasping at the light

circling his head

his neck straining tendons

the juddering pulse of jaw in his temples

as he spoke but didn’t speak

the shock of a fox-scream of a chid

in a gallery of

quiet, low bass murmuring.

She put on the brake and went,

a minute or so alone in the ladies.

Locking the door

she rested her head against the cold metal paper dispenser.

‘What if you just left?

What if you pulled open the glass doors and

walked in your soft soled shoes

across St Peter’s Square to the library

and on to the place where the Halle used to be and

to a train and the parallel lines of track reaching into the distance?’

I’ve polished off a good half of a nice bottle of plonk and I’ve got Elbow playing at Glastonbury live in my kitchen and I re-read my Latitude poem (the one that Mr Garvey read on his Radio 6 show a couple of years ago and which seems to have been my 15 minutes) and it really makes me smile…so I thought I’d re-send it into the ether….

I’m a sucker for white linen. Can’t go a summer without a new white linen frock. There’s something utterly lovely about that first day, that high summer heat which permits its wearing. I’ve stopped caring too that it might be a bit transparent.

This linen came from the Cloth House, Berwick Street (it’s very nice quality).